The Hunt (The Cage 2)

He ran a hand down her hair, appraising it like it was already hanging from a hook in his room. “Read my thoughts, you mean? That was easy enough to get around. They can’t read minds when they’re uncloaked, and they’re always uncloaked in the menageries. So this is where I stay. I have no life outside of the menageries and my quarters.”

Blood kept seeping from the wound on her shin, but she felt nothing. Not a single muscle would respond to her internal screams to move. Soon, she wouldn’t even be able to speak. All she would have left was her mind.

“But,” Anya whispered, “not all swords are held in the hand. Real power lies in the mind.”

“You’ve lived among them . . . without any . . . perceptive abilities?” Cora managed to ask.

He aimed the gun. “Flattery won’t help you.”

“I’m serious. Not a single . . . ability?”

His smile started to fade. “I used my intelligence alone. We’re smarter than the Kindred realize, even if their mental abilities are impossible for us.”

She closed her eyes.

“Oh, I know all about impossibilities.” She concentrated on the stick in his eye. Maybe she couldn’t yet control someone else’s mind, but she could levitate small objects. She wrapped her thoughts around the stick, imagining it was her hand, and she pushed.

The stick jerked.

Roshian screamed.

And then she pushed again. A nudge. And another. Roshian dropped the gun. She didn’t let go of the stick with her mind. She pushed it farther, steadily and slowly, letting her anger cut through the pain piercing her head, through the sound of him screaming as he crumpled to the ground, through the blood that was dribbling from her nose. He was human, and the human brain was soft and easily damaged. She pushed the stick farther, all the way, until it tapped against the back of his skull.

He collapsed facedown on the ground. Blood pooled beneath his head.

She released her hold on the stick. Her whole body started shaking, though she couldn’t feel a single muscle. She couldn’t stand. Couldn’t move. Blood poured from her nose faster but she couldn’t lift a hand to brush it away, and her skin burned, and then burned harder, and then she couldn’t even feel it anymore. She knew she was crying because she could taste the tears. She might have been screaming, if her throat still worked. Her ears had gone dead too.

Then two hands grabbed her.

She looked at them as though from the far end of binoculars, small brown hands, nails as chewed up and torn as her own. Fingers pinched her arms and shook her, though she couldn’t feel it. A face that was familiar. Stringy black hair and brown eyes that always looked angry, except for now. A mouth that was moving, though she couldn’t hear anything. The girl took something out of her pocket. A smell, sharp and citrusy and peppery all at once, choked Cora’s mouth and made her gasp.

Her sense of sound snapped back into her head at the same time as her reason. Mali. Mali was shaking her, waving her hand in front of her face. Cora heard her own breath coming ragged, half choked with blood that she leaned over to spit up. Feeling was returning to her limbs, and with it, a roar of pain. More footsteps came down the stairs. Leon appeared, looking from her to Roshian on the ground. He kicked at the body to turn it over, and gagged at the gaping eye socket wound.

“Christ, sweetheart! What did you do?” He dry-heaved into the bushes, and then wiped his mouth. “Sorry we didn’t get here sooner. Cassian said the traps in the shipping tunnels would slow us down. We had to take the hallways.”

Cassian was with them?

More footsteps. Heavier ones.

Cassian came thundering down the stairs. He went directly to Roshian’s body and pressed his shoulder to the ground with one booted foot, as though Roshian might try to get up, and then inspected the body to make certain he was dead. Cassian’s head cocked at the sight of the too-red blood.

“I had no choice,” Cora choked, as her voice returned. “He tried to kill me.”

Cassian climbed the stairs to where Cora was doubled over, and gently tilted her chin up to look at the blood trickling from her nose.

“You killed him.”

“He kept coming. He was human—he didn’t care about the moral code.”

She could tell from the lack of surprise on Cassian’s face that he already knew. He ran a thumb gently along the sides of her face, brushing away the blood. He was dressed in his formal Warden’s uniform; he must have been on duty before coming here. “You did this with your mind. You pushed yourself too far.”

“I had to. The bullet . . . I couldn’t move.”

His eyes shifted to her exposed shin, where blood was still flowing from the bullet wound. “This is beyond my abilities to heal. I must take you to Serassi before you lose too much blood.”

She leaned forward, wincing in pain, one strap of the torn gold dress slipping from her shoulder. A few steps off, Mali picked up a Kindred-made pistol Roshian had dropped. She inspected it closely, then aimed at the ground and squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened.

“What about the Council?” Cora said. “When Arrowal finds out about this, he’ll investigate even more closely and figure out I killed him with my mind. He’ll know I’m the agitator they’re looking for. He won’t let me run the Gauntlet—he’ll probably throw me in prison.”

“Let me worry about Arrowal,” Cassian said.

Cora’s eyes shifted to Cassian, and a new fear entered her mind.

His eyes were entirely black.

He was cloaked.

Which meant he could see into their minds. Hers was already masked with enough pain to shield her thoughts, but Mali’s and Leon’s weren’t. Mali had enough training to be able to prevent him from reading her mind, but Leon didn’t.

Cassian had to know that they could get out of their cells. That, for weeks, Leon had been hiding out with the Mosca. That they were negotiating with Bonebreak for a safe room for Nok and Rolf to raise their baby in. That all her training sessions with Cassian were only a lie, and that she had never once intended to actually run the Gauntlet.

Not helping him, but humiliating him.

She searched his eyes, but there was nothing but blackness. Did he know? Or had Leon somehow—miraculously—kept his thoughts private?

“You can’t turn Leon in,” she blurted out.

Cassian didn’t take his eyes away from her face. “We have more pressing matters,” he said, and stood. He took ou

t the temporary removal pass from his pocket, then bent down to pick her up, but she shook her head.

“Promise me, Cassian. Leon isn’t a problem. He’s living in the shipping tunnels, that’s all. You don’t have to turn him in.”

Did he know that this went far beyond Leon being loose on the station? Did he know about her plan to cheat? Did he know everything? She thought back to their last training session. He had already been suspicious when she’d pressed him to help her learn to read minds, until she’d turned it on him and said it was because she wanted to know him better.

Did he know that was a lie too?

He turned to Leon and said quietly, “I suggest you disappear back into whatever hole you crawled out of, and never show yourself again. Another Kindred would not be as forgiving as I. And you, Mali—return to Free Time and do not say a word about what has happened here.” He turned back to Cora. “I will return to take care of Roshian’s body.”

“But . . .”

“I will take care of it.”

His words had an edge, though his face was blank. Even cloaked, he had never been good at hiding his emotions. She didn’t have to be psychic to read the anger and hurt just beneath the surface.

He picked her up as though she weighed nothing. His hand held her under her knees, flooding her with that electric sensation. His chest against her cheek was thudding hard with his pulse, which was pounding too fast for someone supposed to be cloaked. When she looked up, his face was only inches from hers.

Just a few days ago, she had told him: I want to know you, the same way you know me.

He looked away from her, and she saw a flicker of something else beneath his cloaked mask. Pain.

Oh yes. He knew.

He carried her up the rest of the steps silently.

27

Nok

SERASSI, DRESSED IN HER white uniform with the row of knots down the side, blinked at the three-dimensional image on the glowing surface. “What a sweet little baby.”

“Sugary,” Nok corrected. She was getting the hang of this lying thing. Maybe, if they ever saw Earth again, she’d study to be a lawyer. “What a sugary baby, you mean. That’s what we really call babies, not sweet. Your books were wrong again.”